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Thursday, 23 June 2016

Final report: visitor experience in American art museums

The day has finally come - I've submitted my report on my Winston Churchill Memorial Trust-supported trip late last year around art museums in seven different American states.

I've called the report Getting closer, looking deeper, coming back sooner:
The visitor experience in American art museums, mostly because I found myself ready to PDF up my long-laboured-over document and realised I'd never considered a title for it and needed something quickly.

Below are the preface, areas of focus, and bullet-point conclusions from my research trip for context. You can also download the full report(49 pages)

Preface

If the museum is to flourish in the 21st century, it cannot afford to be solely a place of retreat from society. It must stimulate, provoke and engage, as well as offering a place for contemplation or consolation. It must be a place in which we can share in a commonwealth of ideas. (Serota, 2015)

Since the 1970s the stereotype of the museum being a starchily exclusive place for the quiet contemplation of rarities by those with the educational and social advantages to appreciate the experience has been steadily challenged, not least by people working within the sector.

In New Zealand, a wave of new galleries in regional cities (the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1970; The Dowse Art Museum, Lower Hutt, 1971; the Manawatu Art Gallery, Palmerston North, 1977) explicitly set out to make the best of New Zealand's cultural production available to local constituents. An account of the opening of the Manawatu Art Gallery began:

People contributed [to a fundraising drive] because they knew the gallery would not be another city monument to an elitist arts society. Luit Bieringa has deliberately tried to make the gallery as accessible as possible to all the people of the Manawatu, whether their interest be in functional pottery or conceptual art. (Spill, 1977)

Over the course of the 20th century, museums reoriented from a focus on collecting and categorisation to a focus on public service by way of education. This shift saw the visitor grow in prominence in the museum's view of its own operation. Over the past two decades, the visitor has shifted again, now to the centre of the museum's operation. Museums are increasingly seen as social spaces, and today's greatest innovations in museum operations are inspired by the social and economic changes intricately entwined with the rise of the internet.

The GLAMs (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector has avidly adopted the affordances of the internet to find new ways - from social media channels to podcasts to releasing 3D scans of collection items - of connecting the public with their offerings, and to enlarge the voice of individuals within the museum. I count myself fortunate both to have come of professional age in this part of our sector, and to have the opportunity through this research trip to explore some of the world's most vibrantly innovative museums, and better understand how they strive to serve the audiences today, and plan for those of tomorrow.

Areas of focus
My proposal for WCMT funding focused on researching four areas of museum operation:

Connecting with visitors through digital technology

Visible storage displays

New models of membership programmes

Outreach programmes serving people on the autism spectrum and people with dementia, their families and caregivers

Due to several staff not being available at the time I was visiting, or staff turnover at institutions, I was not able to conduct a great deal of research into the outreach programmes I had identified in my original plan. I met with several educators during my visit, but learned little beyond what I already knew from reading online resources.

However, as I travelled, I found myself focusing a great deal on three aspects of the visitor experience that I had not expected to study closely:
exhibition spaces specifically designed to introduce new visitors to the museum's collections and exhibitions, such as those recently created at the Brooklyn Museum and in development at the time of my visit at the Baltimore Museum of Art
the museum store, as a site for preparing for and reflecting on the museum visit
the role of visitor hosts in American museums compared to their New Zealand equivalents.

As a result I have not included a section on outreach programmes in this report, but have written up my observations on key visitor experience trends in a fourth chapter.

Quickfire conclusions
Each of the four focus areas has its own set of conclusions. Here are the highly summarised points from these:

Digital innovation

Leading museums are focusing on developing 'eyes-up' experiences that encourage closer looking, questioning, and further discovery after the physical visit (Cooper Hewitt and Brooklyn Museum)

Museums are using digital projects as part of their overall branding efforts (Cooper Hewitt, DMA, Brooklyn Museum, media stories on opening of Los Angeles' The Broad and SFMOMA in San Francisco)

There is a danger that digital brands may become disassociated from the physical visiting experience (Walker Art Center)

Open storage

Open storage initiatives continue to offer an more 'free range' and exploratory experience for visitors, compared to modernist exhibition design, and also assure visitors that not all the collection is ‘locked away’

Some open storage displays are becoming tired, and feel static (Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum)

There may be lessons for digital innovation projects fuelled by external funding in the model that seems to have been established by the Henry Luce Foundation grants for visible storage (significant initial investment and then dwindling ongoing attention/funding)

Presentation notes (notes from various talks, usually with links to further information and references)

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On the radio

Once a month I drop into Radio New Zealand National as the arts correspondent for the Nine to Noon programme.